Recently, the number of patients of life-style related diseases such as hypertension and diabetes has been increasing year by year. Many of the patients of life-style related diseases do not need to be hospitalized, but they visit medical institutions, e.g., once or twice a month for medical checking. Patients at home use measuring devices for home medical care in order to grasp and manage their own conditions, such as sphygmomanometers and compact blood glucose measuring devices.
For example, diabetics measure their blood glucose level with a compact blood glucose measuring device at home in daily living, and record the measurement result in their ‘memorandum book’ or allow a memory in the device to store the result, so that they are diagnosed by their doctor on the basis of the recorded data when visiting the medical institution.
Such a recent compact measuring device can transmit data to a host computer provided in a medical institution through a telephone line or the like, so that the medical institution can grasp the condition of the patient even if the patient does not come to the medical institution. As a result, the patient can decrease the number of visits to the medical institution.
For example, JP07(1995)-116127 A discloses a home medical care data management device that can register only data the patient needs, among data measured by the patient using the measuring device. Unless an operation for directing registration is conducted, this device will not register data measured by the patient outside a predetermined measurement time or data measured by a third party using the device. Therefore, it can transmit to a medical institution only measurement data that the medical institution needs.
However, it is known that numerical values of examination items relating to the life-style diseases (blood glucose level, blood pressure, urine or the like) will vary depending on the patient's condition, and thus selecting only exclusive data that the patient needs and transmitting the data to a medical institution is insufficient for the medical institution to diagnose the patient. For example, since the blood glucose level may vary depending on meals, exercises, stress, dosage or the like, checking the influences of these factors is essential for validly comprehending the measurement values. It is particularly known that the blood glucose level is influenced greatly by meals. The blood glucose is lowered when the patient is hungry, and increased after meals. For this reason, knowing the condition of the patient at the measurement is necessary for validly determining the measurement data.
A conventional blood glucose measuring device (“GLUCOCARD GT-1650” produced by Arkray, Inc.) has an “after-meal mark” storage function. This function is for allowing the measuring device to store an “after-meal mark” together with measurement data obtained after a meal so as to indicate that the data is obtained after a meal. A series of operation procedures for storing the “after-meal mark” will be explained below.
A blood glucose measuring device enters a mode of setting an “after-meal mark” after a measurement of blood glucose level, so that it displays a measured value on its screen and also blinks an after-meal mark on the upper right of the measured value. If the measurer continues to press the operation button for at least 2 seconds during the after-meal mark is blinking, the after-meal mark turns on and the measurement result is stored as an after-meal measured value in this blood glucose measuring device. The blood glucose measuring device has a “control mark” storing function as well. By pressing the operation button once briefly during the “after-meal mark” is blinking, a display of “CONT” comes on and the measurement result will be stored as a result of measurement of a standard solution for confirming an accuracy of the blood glucose measuring device.
Since only measurement data registered by a patient will be transmitted to a medical institution in the case of the home medical care data management device, the patient may manipulate the measurement data. For example, the patient will not register data in a case the data are abnormal. Even when the abnormal data are transmitted, the medical institution cannot grasp the cause of the abnormal data, and confirmation of the cause should wait until the patient visits the medical institution for a medical procedure. The patient may forget the situation under which the abnormal data are generated in a case that some days have passed after the generation of the abnormal data by the time the patient visits the medical institution, and this will inhibit grasping of the cause of the abnormal data.
Though the blood glucose measuring device can add a meal mark to the measured value so as to indicate that the measured value is obtained after a meal, it has not been possible to obtain detailed information, for example, whether the measured value is obtained immediately after a meal or after one hour.
It is effective in a medical practice to record times of occurrence of events that will affect the measurement data, for example, times of procedures such as “insulin injection” other than the meal times. However, conventional devices have no functions of storing them. Though in designing the device it is possible to provide various event informations such as storing “control mark” to the measurement result, this will complicate the button operations, so that the operations will be cumbersome for the patient who performs the measurement.
An object of the present invention is to provide a measuring device with a comment input function, which enables storage of an arbitrary comment with simple operations.